31.10. 10. Riches of the Clergy.
So great were the donations made to the
clergy that under the three races of our princes they must have several
times received the full property of all the lands of the kingdom. But if
our kings, the nobility, and the people found the way of giving them all
their estates, they found also the method of getting them back again.
The spirit of devotion established a great number of churches under the
first race; but the military spirit was the cause of their being given
away afterwards to the soldiery, who divided them among their children.
What a number of lands must have then been taken from the clergy's
mensalia/ The kings of the second race opened their hands, and made new
donations to them; but the Normans, who came afterwards, plundered and
ravaged all before them, wreaking their vengeance chiefly on the priests
and monks, and devoting every religious house to destruction. For they
charged those ecclesiastics with the destruction of their idols, and
with all the oppressive measures of Charlemagne by which they had been
successively obliged to take shelter in the north. These were
animosities which the space of forty or fifty years had not been able to
obliterate. In this situation, what losses must the clergy have
sustained! There were hardly ecclesiastics left to demand the estates of
which they had been deprived. There remained, therefore, for the
religious piety of the third race, foundations enough to make, and lands
to bestow. The opinions which were spread abroad and believed in those
days would have deprived the laity of all their estates, if they had
been but virtuous enough. But if the clergy were actuated by ambition,
the laity were not without theirs; if dying persons gave their estates
to the church, their heirs would fain resume them. We meet with
continual quarrels between the lords and the bishops, the gentlemen and
the abbots; and the clergy must have been very hard pressed, since they
were obliged to put themselves under the protection of certain lords,
who granted them a momentary defence, and afterwards joined their
oppressors.
But a better administration having been established under the third
race gave the clergy leave to augment their possessions; when the
Calvinists started up, and having plundered the churches, they turned
all the sacred plate into specie. How could the clergy be sure of their
estates, when they were not even safe in their persons? They were
debating on controversial subjects while their archives were in flames.
What did it avail them to demand back of an impoverished nobility those
estates which were no longer in possession of the latter, but had been
conveyed into other hands by different mortgages? The clergy have been
long acquiring, and have often refunded, and still there is no end of
their acquisitions.
